Why Export ?

Today's small businesses can operate anywhere around the world and exporting becomes essential for them in order to grow.

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Video Transcript

00:28 Bob LaPointe: When I am asked the question, why export? I guess I would answer with another question, which is why find a new customer? Why find another new market? Why grow your business?

00:40 Cathy Martine: Today small businesses can operate anywhere around the world and exporting becomes essential for them in terms of their ability to grow. Depending on their products and services there's only so much opportunity in the United States and the opportunity for them to distribute their products and services globally is enabled by the internet and online commerce. You can effectively use the web to communicate everything about your products and services and allow a customer to buy your services no matter where you are or no matter where they are because technology allows that to happen.

01:09 Ambassador Ron Kirk: I think any business that is selling a product or service to customers in the United States should look at exporting for the simple proposition, its just access to more customers and if you can sell more that's how you grow your business, that's how you hire more employees, that's how you create more wealth for you and for your workers.

01:28 John Joyce: It prolongs life cycle of a product. It makes the company more competitive.

01:34 Howard Melamed: What's incredible about having a small business in exporting is that we can act like the big guys of the world. It's not the Lockheed Martins and all those other people that sell those jets that can benefit from the export business. Matter of fact small business employs a majority of the people in this country. And can you imagine if the small businesses got involved in export to a great degree, if we can increase our size of business 30-40% how many more people can we employ? How great will our business be at that point?

02:05 Secretary Gary Locke: And we know that jobs associated with exports by and large pay roughly 15% more than the typical job in America.

02:13 Amy Frey: The US market is a huge importer and we bring products in from all over the world to compete on our shelves. What's amazing to me is that there are so many small businesses here in the United States that make great products, have great ideas, and/or fantastic services or design concepts. And those companies are already competing globally because all these other companies from other markets are coming in and competing with us here in our own market. So, to me I don't see exporting as an option. I see it as an absolute must.

02:57 Dan Nanigian: One of the things that's really interesting about why we decided to focus on export and in particular Asia, is that I realized eventually my existing customer base was going to be there and what I wanted to do was get there before them. So that when they showed up and they needed a thermocouple or an RTD sensor, they would look around and they would see someone they knew.

03:21 Gary Wrench: With 95% of your market outside the US it only makes sense to get into the export market.

03:28 Speaker 10: And also, it provides an opportunity for new teaming arrangements and new partnerships that the company may not have been able to develop in the domestic market.

03:38 Paula Murphy: It also helps them to diversify their market base if they're exporting to a number of different countries. When the economy is not doing well in one country, it might be doing better in another country and it helps to make their sales base a lot more stable.

03:53 Amy Frey: Such a large part of our business today is based on clients from overseas. We have not probably experienced so many effects of the downturn in the way others may have in our industry.

04:07 Ambassador Ron Kirk: There is an implied element of safety, of quality, when customers around the world know that what they are buying has either been made, grown, raised, created here in America.

04:23 Lawunmi Famuagun: People do, they do trust the American brand. They have big faith... I mean we've proven ourselves over the years that this is the place to be. So a lot of people do want to, they give you... They're very open to you so they give you a chance.

04:38 Dan Nanigian: We have three times the employees we did six years ago. These are families that now have good jobs in a pretty exciting, vibrant company. And that's a neat thing.

04:50 Grace Davis: The government for example, as you can see, its all over the news, is putting a huge effort into signing free trade agreements with many many countries and that is a good way of taking our products because they will not make them more expensive to the end-user overseas.

05:11 Ambassador Ron Kirk: There's a wonderful African proverb that maybe helpful that, "If you never leave home, you believe the world is your backyard".